SMART NATIONAL MUSTER - Centre Hall, PA

Special Military Active-Retired Travelers (SMART) National Muster

Centre Hall, PA

September 7th - Tuesday

Lou and I arrived at the Muster on Monday (Labor Day) around 3:00 pm. Good friends had saved us a spot as we were supposed to report on Saturday and opted to attend a family picnic to be able to see Lou’s grandson that was home from the service for the weekend. After the picnic we went to my daughter Susan’s house to see my grandson that just returned from a special schooling with the Marines, where he finished with a 96.8% grade. Travis, Noell and little Wyatt will be moving to a suburb of Philadelphia, so we are all thrilled with this aspect, as they will be much closer to home. After two tours in Iraq this is a very welcoming news.

After we arrived at our campsite, we got settled in and after saying hello to our many friends here, we had a quick supper, as we had missed lunch altogether. One of our friends came running over as we were finishing dinner and wanted us to come to their RV to play Hand and Foot, a new game that Lou and I learned at the last Muster. Sad for Shirley and I the guys beat us by 2,000 points. Oh well, we have a week to score victory.

We were all up early this am and Lou had parking duty and I was off to the First Aid station. One other nurse and myself are going to man the station from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm each day working in four hour shifts and them each of our RV’s will be the station in the evening.

Lou and I briefly met for a few minutes to have lunch together and he was off to off load the food for tomorrow. $500.00 spent at the grocery for lunch for everyone.

When I got back to the RV tonight we had an hour to grab some dinner and be ready to set out flags with two other guys at 6:30 pm. Steve had told about a great little place to eat, but when we got there found it was closed on Tuesdays, so we drove into town and ate at a new Italian Restaurant and their special for tonight was Shrimp Scampi and it was loaded with garlic, but was wonderful. It was served with a beautiful Italian salad and freshly baked garlic rolls. We just had to have the Factory Cheesecake with Raspberry sauce and two forks for dessert.

While Lou, Steve and Bill placed 84 flags in the ground, Estee and I took a long walk, checked out the shower houses, and tent city. You will note from the pictures, the huge number of tents that the fairgrounds put up for the fair. I understand that there is a waiting list for people to get into them. People even bring their televisions and such to use while here. The tents all have electric, rather amazing.

I am going to show pictures of the camping area as of today and tomorrow is the opening day, when we expect the majority of the people to check in. The whole day and evening are full of planned activities, starting at 6:00 am, so will try to keep you updated on the happenings. I don’t have internet coverage here, so will have to find someplace with WiFi.

Mountain Retreat

August 31st - Tuesday Sunny and very warm

Monday Lou and I were up early and into town to run a couple errands prior to driving to our friends home in Troy, PA, then on to Mountain Lake to spend a delightful afternoon at their country cabin on the Mountain Lake.

June had prepared a delightful lunch. She is originally from Philadelphia, the home of the "grinders"; therefore, she prepared grinders for all of us. We were also joined by another couple that had been members in SMART and had dropped out due to health problems. We had a lot of time to catch up on and the afternoon went so quickly.

We are our lunch on a screened in porch overlooking the lake with a delightful breeze flowing in on all of us. The cabin is full of antiques and history just poured from the walls, they have a scrapbook that they have kept that originated back to the first owner complete with receipts for all repairs that date back for over 100 years.

All too soon, it was time to drive back to Troy. Steve took us on a tour of the countryside of rural Troy and we ended up at their original bed and breakfast and then on to some of the newer developments in Troy. It was a wonderful day with our friends, and we left for home around 7:00 pm.

Upon arrival home, we decided to take advantage of the night air and built a fire in our outside stove and sat on the glider and talked and watched the many planes that are in our sky each and every evening.

This morning, we went back to the RV to do some last minute things in preparation for our SMART gathering at Centre Hall this weekend. We still don't have our steps or the parking brake repaired and Lou noticed a bit of a "skip" on his drive back from Morris. After some checking, he noted a crack in the manifold, so once again the RV went to Covington for a consult and it is scheduled for the installation of a new manifold for late in September. Lou's mechanic felt it was safe to drive it to Centre Hall, so the trip is still on. It certainly has put us back into the trading spirit and we spent some time on the computer looking at 2011 models.

I was able to get the lower part of our lawn cut this afternoon and cut off dead blooms on the roses and found that the bugs are about eating them up, so got them all sprayed and cut off the holly hocks and placed the seeds in a spot that would benefit from new seedlings.

We found that Lou's grandson is coming home on leave this weekend, so made several e-mails to our SMART group and have decided to postpone our departure by one day; therefore, will have a change to see this young man on Sunday after church.

Tomorrow we are going to run errands and that will allow us the rest of the week to get everything done here at home prior of our absence. Wish the weather could be a bit cooler, I do believe the calendar tells us fall is on its way and I for one am ready.

Square Dance Camp - Morris, PA

August 27th - Friday - Beautiful - Ideal weather

We left home yesterday around 2:00 pm to drive the twenty miles to Morris, PA to take part in the Canyon Square Camping Weekend. It was the perfect day to be outside and to enjoy the beautiful mountains and country breezes.

Lou was up early and went to our friends house, that is recovering from cancer, and helped he and his wife hook up their fifth wheel. They were not able to attend last year as he was receiving chemo at the time. So this year we are excited to have them in attendance. In fact they are parked right next to us.

This is a great group of people and we all have such a good time together. Yesterday, we all took our time setting up and just enjoyed chatting with one another. There were no planned activities yesterday or last evening.

We all sat outside and talked until dinner time and all back to their rigs to fix dinner. Lou and I had been cheated out of our good dinner on Wednesday, so I brought along pork chops so I fried them, cook potatoes to mash, had fresh green beans and made milk gravy along with freshly baked banana bread, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers from the garden and for dessert, I had baked a homemade chocolate-raspberry cheesecake.

After the kitchen was cleaned up and dishes done, we had friends from Middlebury Center that stopped in to chat, after they left, Lou and I settled down for the evening and enjoyed a movie that had just arrived. It was suggested by one of our SMART friends. The Bucket List, and Steve was right, it was a good movie and we both enjoyed it. We got ready for bed and both of us enjoyed our books that we had brought along.

We awoke early this morning and we were cold, it was 48 degrees outside, and I reminded Lou that he laughed at me last night when I told him I was going to turn on our electric blanket. At that point this morning, Lou turned on the heat, and it did feel darn good.

After breakfast we went into the building where we will hold the dances and decorated the tables with fresh flowers that everyone brought from home and set up the chairs for on lookers and put out games and puzzles for folks that don't want to dance. We also set up tables for a Chinese auction and used square dancing clothing.

Tonight we are all going to the "fish fry" at the hotel in Morris and we dance at 7:00 with ice cream sundaes after we finish at 10:00 pm. Saturday is full of many workshops, for square and round dancing and a pot luck dinner at 5:00 and "dressed" dancing tomorrow evening. We finish with a worship service on Sunday and a "trail away" dance following the service.

A New Project

August 25th Wednesday - Sunny with bright blue sky

We were up early this am and left for Williamsport with the RV to have the problem with the steps looked at again. As I sit in the customer waiting room, it is a puzzle for the technician, but he promised he will keep working on the problem. For those of you that don’t understand the seriousness of this problem, if the steps come out while we are traveling, this presents a huge problem for the driver, as we could catch or bump any obstruction that might present itself.

You can see from the pictures, we have started a new project. As with most projects, this came about due to a project someplace else. The project elsewhere originated as a result of my brother wanting to cement the floor in the farmhouse where Krista lives. My mother had a ceramic shop in the farmhouse prior to her death and the molds are still in the basement and Jerry told Krista and I we could have the molds if we wanted them.

Lou looked at our large barn where all of our large molds are stored and felt we could store the molds by building some new shelving. Enter our "tack room" that has a new roof, however, still leaks and as a result of this leak, the floor was rotting, so Lou thought we should take everything out of the tack room and tear out the floor and replace the flooring. Good thought, and of course, what sounded like an easy job was complicated . We found that the joices under the floor were also rotted.

Lou and I scoured through lumber we had stored and found lumber that could be sawed and made into 2x4’s . Krista's in laws were at her house helping her, as it ended up Bob and Cliff helped Lou cut the lumber up and make new joices and even stayed to help Lou get them into place. I carried boards that could be used for the new flooring from the barn to the new construction site and before we quit for the evening, they were laid into place.

My brother was good enough to bring us a hay wagon to load all of our burnables on and he hauled the wagon load to his house to be burned at a later date.

As the day ended, both of our out buildings were cleaned out and we can not progress on with screwing the floor into place, then we want to stain the floor to match the stained walls. Lou and I have decided to move all of the wood working equipment into this old tack room and now call it the Wood Shop. This will give Lou a place to do his wood working projects and we won’t have to worry about cleaning up saw dust from the ceramics.

I have to tell you a bit about this building we now call the Wood Shop. This building is over 100 years old and came from a neighbors farm about a mile away. My dad and a neighbor, Francis Spencer, used my dad’s team of horses to drag it my father’s farm in 1938. It was painted white and housed chickens, pigs, young stock and was a much loved playhouse for my brother and me.

After I moved back to Pennsylvania from Ohio, we decided we would like to have some chickens and asked Daddy if we could have the old building that was behind his barn. Well, my dad’s eyes lighted up and he said sure, and he and my now deceased husband would go to the woods and cut down some trees to use as skids and they would use the Ford tractor and skid it once again back down the field to our house.

I can remember to this day, as we were preparing the building to be moved, asking Al if he knew what we were doing and Al’s reply was “No, but your dad does and we will just do what he tells us to do” and that is exactly what we did.

The building arrived in one piece, barely, and we were delighted with our new possession and we went to work getting it ready to house some chickens and would you believe a billy goat also.

You can see from the story the old building has been many things prior to coming to our house and has housed sheep, chickens, turkeys and was once again a playhouse for our granddaughter and her friends from down the road and now this granddaughter and her friend (Michelle and Curtis are off to college as new freshman and the old building is going to be a wood shop for my new husband.

I want to make new curtains for the windows and do some sprucing up so Lou can truly enjoy his time there and we can enjoy the doing some projects together in the Wood Shop. I will try to remember to include some pictures of the completed project before the snow flies.

We have square dancing this evening and tomorrow we leave for Square Dancing Camp in Morris through Sunday afternoon. This promises to be a really fun weekend, as we camp together and have couples from other Square Dancing Club attend also. We have some meals together and of course, have some workshops and dance on Friday and Saturday night and again on Sunday after our church service.

Monday we have been invited to Mountain Lake by our friends in Troy and we are both looking forward to that and the remainder of the week will be getting ready for out nine day campout in Centre Hall the first of September. When we arrive home after that campout we will hit the ground and fly through all of the jobs that need to be completed prior to cold weather.

PS Would you believe we are back home, we were away for twelve hours, waiting on the RV repair and it is still not repaired. We have stumped the technician. They have called Workhorse regarding the brake system and Quickie regarding our steps, so we came home the same as we left with the exception we have a new fuel filter and a tank full of fresh water. Decisions - Decisions. We missed square dancing, but are still going to camp, in fact we are going to help a friend get ready in the morning before we go. Guess the grass will have to wait at each of our homes this week.